IN the same way John Howard is a prime
ministerial "cricket tragic", others are captivated by the American Civil War.
ALP leader Kim Beazley, NSW premier Bob Carr and AFL coach Kevin Sheedy are
apparently among the aficionados. Peter Minack is not, even though he has just
written a Civil War novel, CWG (Campaigning with Grant) (Vintage,
280pp, $19.70). "A surprisingly large sub-culture is fixated on it," the
Melbourne author says, with no little awe. "And even heavy metal fans, UFO
conspiracists and the Hezbollah avoid civil war nuts because they think
they're too obsessive."

Civil, of course, is a cruel misnomer for any intra-national war, and the
American North-South divide of the 1860s was as brutally uncivil as the recent
Balkans implosions. Minack's novel, his first, has similarly Gothic undertones
to Jack Dann's recent The Silent, leavened by a wry black humour and a
playful, post-modernist cynicism. After all, the narrator is a ghost writing
130 years after his death. But there's no ethereal wistfulness about him -
he's a tetchy, hero-worshipping diarist with a late-20th century scepticism
towards historical "truths". His self-aggrandizing story is gripping, as
constructively entertaining as it is deconstructive of war, gallantry and the
fiascoes that become triumphs.

John Rawlins was Union General Ulysses S. Grant's chief of staff more by
accident than personal attribute. In CWG, his street-wise take on politics
blends with a 19th century sensibility to present a war report unlike any
other. His worldview is absurdly self-centred, and even as he casts himself as
sardonic truth-teller, he half-believes his mock-heroic interpretations. He
aims to "correct" history's apologist gloss with no-illusions clarity; in the
process, he exposes his own flaws and foibles.

Such a modern voice in such an anachronistic context was ripe for comic
possibilities, says Minack: "I wanted a narrator displaced from his own
history, whose experiences readers could accept as real. Then the
impossibility of the novel's premise becomes irrelevant because what he is
describing is authentic. But the book isn't really about the war at all - it's
about Rawlins and his eventful life."

At 38, the novelist admits he himself lives a "totally unexotic lifestyle,
I'm afraid - no hang-gliding, abseiling or Patagonian expeditions to talk
about". A life-long Melburnian, he teaches at a high school "where there are
87 different cultures among the pupils. I'm an English teacher but I go where
the kids want to go - and that's not high literature. More and more, it's
media and info-technology; I'm happy to do that because it's cultural
involvement, which for kids from an outsider's background is integral."

Cultural connection has powerful resonance. His German father fought with
the Axis in World War II and was a PoW for five years before emigrating. His
"Irish Catholic Australian mother met Dad in 1952 around Albury-Wodonga, and
at the time their relationship was a bit socially hairy." They survived that
to give him and his four brothers "a pure suburban upbringing - it was all
totally normal yet I never felt entirely like a typical Aussie kid, even
though I defined - and define - myself through barracking for Richmond."

He could not shake a sense of otherness. "Dad used to tell me when I was
watching, say, a war movie on TV that I shouldn't believe what this culture
tells me, that the truth was sanitised. I didn't know then what he meant,
although I do now. Consequently, I always look at things from a perspective
outside the stereotype. I never felt an outsider to the same extent as the wop
kids at school with the funny names did, but I did feel agin' it all,
resistant to that Anglo-Saxon propaganda."

Such party-line resistance underlies CWG. "Six years ago I decided it was
now or never - that the only thing in my life I knew absolutely was that I
wanted to write a book," Minack recalls. "To force myself to do that, I went
from teaching full-time to three days a week. But I had no idea what writers
did, or even what they looked like." He signed up for a writing course "which
helped but also hindered. I had serious fears I might be no good at it, and I
was frightened by the passion of some people I met who were doing stuff I
thought was basically shit. There was a touch of desperation about them, and I
was terrified that could also be me."

His Civil War interest had been piqued by an SBS television documentary,
then nourished by the histories of Geoffrey C. Ward and Shelby Foote. An
"author in search of a plot", he found the relationship between Grant and
Rawlins "resonating within me. They were not the simple, brave and noble
soldiers of most war stories, and my interpretation of their weird
relationship is the core of CWG. What the real Grant meant to the real Rawlins
probably bears no relationship to that."

Research was essentially "studying a few books" culled from military book
rooms, sect-like hide-outs for secret men's business: "There were no women,
just men shuffling around with shamed glee, avoiding eye contact, excitedly
pouncing on a new copy of Insignia on the Left Boot Heel of the 33rd Panzer
Division. The sophistication and breadth of military writing is equal to other
academic subjects ... and probably just as useless."

Central to the novel are fathers and father figures: Rawlins' relationship
to his oppressive, deadbeat father; Grant's black-sheep role in his father's
eye; Rawlins' idolisation of Grant. "That was the hook for me," Minack agrees.
"Initially I was planning to write about the enigmatic Grant, a wastrel and a
drunk until his late 30s who within four years went to saviour of the nation."
But Rawlins took over as the tale progressed.

For Minack, the key question became this: if your father doesn't earn your
respect, what does that do for your life? "My interest was in no way
autobiographical," he clarifies. "My own father was reliable, intelligent,
hard-working. But I wondered what difference it would have made if he hadn't
been, if I had been like the student who told me sadly that his father was 'a
complete arsehole'. But all this analysis and interpretation is retrospective
- at the time I just wanted to write something that was readable."

Now, whether or not CWG sells, "the accomplishment has been in getting it
published. I'm rapt, totally rapt. The phone call from (Random House
publisher) Jane Palfreyman saying she wanted it was the great justification.
But I'm aware that reading books is, as Martin Amis puts it, a minority
interest - I'd love an audience yet my own sense of achievement won't be
diminished if it doesn't sell. The personal attainment has been in having
written it."

And for those who distrust "faction", he cites Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose
essay History "argues that when we find things in history that tell us about
ourselves, it becomes irrelevant where or when those things happened. My hope
is the novel connects with what Emerson called 'some reality in our secret
experience'."